Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 848
An army has marched across a wilderness, its column, in the military phrase, in the air; under a confident commander who is certain he will pick up new communications which will be far better than the old ones. When the soldiers are almost worn out with marching, and the rank and file of them have suffered horrible privations from hunger and exposure, they find they have only advanced unsupported into a hostile country; and that the signs of military occupation to be seen on every side are only those of an enemy closing round. The march is suddenly halted and the commander addresses his men. There are a great many things that he may say. Some may hold that he had much better say nothing at all. Many may hold that the less he says the better. Others may urge, very truly, that courage is even more needed for a retreat than for an advance. He may be advised to rouse his disappointed men by threatening the enemy with a more dramatic disappointment; by declaring that they will best him yet; that they will dash out of the net even as it is thrown, and that their escape will be far more victorious than his victory. But anyhow there is one kind of speech which the commander will not make to his men, unless he is much more of a fool than his original blunder proves him. He will not say: “We have now taken up a position which may appear to you very depressing; but I assure you it is nothing to the depression which you will certainly suffer as you make a series of inevitably futile attempts to improve it, or to fall back on what you may foolishly regard as a stronger position. I am very much amused at your absurd suggestions for getting back to our old communications; for I never thought much of your mangy old communications anyhow.” There have been mutinies in the desert before now; and it is possible that the general will not be killed in battle with the enemy.
A great nation and civilization has followed for a hundred years or more a form of progress which held itself independent of certain old communications, in the form of ancient traditions about the land, the hearth, or the altar. It has advanced under leaders who were confident, not to say cocksure. They were quite sure that their economic rules were rigid, that their political theory was right, that their commerce was beneficent, that their parliaments were popular, that their press was enlightened, that their science was humane. In this confidence they committed their people to certain new and enormous experiments; to making their own independent nation an eternal debtor to a few rich men; to piling up private property in heaps on the faith of financiers; to covering their land with iron and stone and stripping it of grass and grain; to driving food out of their own country in the hope of buying it back again from the ends of the earth; to loading up their little island with iron and gold till it was weighted like a sinking ship; to letting the rich grow richer and fewer and the poor poorer and more numerous; to letting the whole world be cloven in two with a war of mere masters and mere servants; to losing every type of moderate prosperity and candid patriotism, till there was no independence without luxury and no labour without ugliness; to leaving the millions of mankind dependent on indirect and distant discipline and indirect and distant sustenance, working themselves to death for they knew not whom and taking the means of life from they knew not where; and all hanging on a thread of alien trade which grew thinner and thinner. To the people who have been brought into this position many things may still be said. It will be right to remind them that mere wild revolt will make things worse and not better. It may be true to say that certain complexities must be tolerated for a time because they correspond to other complexities, and the two must be carefully simplified together. But if I may say one word to the princes and rulers of such a people, who have led them into such a pass, I would say to them as seriously as anything was ever said by man to men: “For God’s sake, for our sake, but, above all, for your own sake, do not be in this blind haste to tell them there is no way out of the trap into which your folly has led them; that there is no road except the road by which you have brought them to ruin; that there is no progress except the progress that has ended here. Do not be so eager to prove to your hapless victims that what is hapless is also hopeless. Do not be so anxious to convince them, now that you are at the end of your experiment, that you are also at the end of your resources. Do not be so very eloquent, so very elaborate, so very rational and radiantly convincing in proving that your own error is even more irrevocable and irremediable than it is. Do not try to minimize the industrial disease by showing it is an incurable disease. Do not brighten the dark problem of the coal-pit by proving it is a bottomless pit. Do not tell the people there is no way but this; for many even now will not endure this. Do not say to men that this alone is possible; for many already think it impossible to bear. And at some later time, at some eleventh hour, when the fates have grown darker and the ends have grown clearer, the mass of men may suddenly understand into what a blind alley your progress has led them. Then they may turn on you in the trap. And if they bore all else, they might not bear the final taunt that you can do nothing; that you will not even try to do anything. ‘What art thou, man, and why art thou despairing?’ wrote the poet. ‘God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.’ Man also may forgive you for blundering and may not forgive you for despairing.”
IV ON A SENSE OF PROPORTION
Those of us who study the papers and the parliamentary speeches with proper attention must have by this time a fairly precise idea of the nature of the evil of Socialism. It is a remote Utopian dream impossible of fulfilment and also an overwhelming practical danger that threatens us at every moment. It is only a thing that is as distant as the end of the world and as near as the end of the street. All that is clear enough; but the aspect of it that arrests me at this moment is more especially the Utopian aspect. A person who used to write in the Daily Mail paid some attention to this aspect; and represented this social ideal, or indeed almost any other social ideal, as a sort of paradise of poltroons. He suggested that “weaklings” wished to be protected from the strain and stress of our vigorous individualism, and so cried out for this paternal government or grand-motherly legislation. And it was while I was reading his remarks, with a deep and never-failing enjoyment, that the image of the Individualist rose before me; of the sort of man who probably writes such remarks and certainly reads them.
The reader refolds the Daily Mail and rises from his intensely individualistic breakfast-table, where he has just dispatched his bold and adventurous breakfast; the bacon cut in rashers from the wild boar which but lately turned to bay in his back garden; the eggs perilously snatched from swaying nest and flapping bird at the top of those toppling trees which gave the house its appropriate name of Pine Crest. He puts on his curious and creative hat, built on some bold plan entirely made up out of his own curious and creative head. He walks outside his unique and unparalleled house, also built with his own well-won wealth according to his own well-conceived architectural design, and seeming by its very outline against the sky to express his own passionate personality. He strides down the street, making his own way over hill and dale towards the place of his own chosen and favourite labour, the workshop of his imaginative craft. He lingers on the way, now to pluck a flower, now to compose a poem, for his time is his own; he is an individual and a free man and not as these Communists. He can work at his own craft when he will, and labour far into the night to make up for an idle morning. Such is the life of the clerk in a world of private enterprise and practical individualism; such the manner of his free passage from his home. He continues to stride lightly along, until he sees afar off the picturesque and striking tower of that workshop in which he will, as with the creative strokes of a god . . .
He sees it, I say, afar off. The expression is not wholly accidental. For that is exactly the defect in all that sort of journalistic philosophy of individualism and enterprise; that those things are at present even more remote and improbable than communal visions. It is not the dreadful Bolshevist republic that is afar off. It is not the Socialistic State that is Utopian. In that sense, it is not even Utopia that is Utopian. The Socialist State may in one sense be very truly described as terribly and menacingly near. The Socialist State is exceedingly like the Capitalist State, in which the clerk reads and the journalist writes. Utopia is exactly like the present state of affairs, only worse.
It would make no difference to the clerk if his job became a part of a Government department to-morrow. He would be equally civilized and equally uncivic if the distant and shadowy person at the head of the department were a Government official. Indeed, it does make very little difference to him now, whether he or his sons and daughters are employed at the Post Office on bold and revolutionary Socialistic principles or employed at the Stores on wild and adventurous Individualist principles. I never heard of anything resembling civil war between the daughter at the Stores and the daughter in the Post Office. I doubt whether the young lady at the Post Office is so imbued with Bolshevist principles that she would think it a part of the Higher Morality to expropriate something without payment off the counter of the Stores. I doubt whether the young lady at the Stores shudders when she passes a red pillar box, seeing in it an outpost of the Red Peril.
What is really a long way off is this individuality and liberty the Daily Mail praised. It is the tower that a man has built for himself that is seen in the distance. It is Private Enterprise that is Utopian, in the sense of something as distant as Utopia. It is Private Property that is for us an ideal and for our critics an impossibility. It is that which can really be discussed almost exactly as the writer in the Daily Mail discusses Collectivism. It is that which some people consider a goal and some people a mirage. It is that which its friends maintain to be the final satisfaction of modern hopes and hungers, and its enemies maintain to be a contradiction to common sense and common human possibilities. All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists’ ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature. They are saying that all practical business men know that the thing would never work, exactly as the same obliging people are always prepared to know that State management would never work. For they hold the simple and touching faith that no management except their own could ever work. They call this the law of nature; and they call anybody who ventures to doubt it a weakling. But the point to see is that, although the normal solution of private property for all is even now not very widely realized, in so far as it is realized by the rulers of the modern market (and therefore of the modern world) it is to this normal notion of property that they apply the same criticism as they applied to the abnormal notion of Communism. They say it is Utopian; and they are right. They say it is idealistic; and they are right. They say it is quixotic; and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out of the world; every name that will measure how remote from them and their sort is the standard of honourable living; every name that will emphasize and repeat the fact that property and liberty are sundered from them and theirs, by an abyss between heaven and hell.
That is the real issue to be fought out with our serious critics; and I have written here a series of articles dealing more directly with it. It is the question of whether this ideal can be anything but an ideal; not the question of whether it is to be confounded with the present contemptible reality. It is simply the question of whether this good thing is really too good to be true. For the present I will merely say that if the pessimists are convinced of their pessimism, if the sceptics really hold that our social ideal is now banished for ever by mechanical difficulties or materialistic fate, they have at least reached a remarkable and curious conclusion. It is hardly stranger to say that man will have henceforth to be separated from his arms and legs, owing to the improved pattern of wheels, than to say that he must for ever say farewell to two supports so natural as the sense of choosing for himself and of owning something of his own. These critics, whether they figure as critics of Socialism or Distributism, are very fond of talking about extravagant stretches of the imagination or impossible strains upon human nature. I confess I have to stretch and strain my own human imagination and human nature very far, to conceive anything so crooked and uncanny as the human race ending with a complete forgetfulness of the possessive pronoun.
Nevertheless, as we say, it is with these critics we are in controversy. Distribution may be a dream; three acres and a cow may be a joke; cows may be fabulous animals; liberty may be a name; private enterprise may be a wild goose chase on which the world can go no further. But as for the people who talk as if property and private enterprise were the principles now in operation — those people are so blind and deaf and dead to all the realities of their own daily existence, that they can be dismissed from the debate.
In this sense, therefore, we are indeed Utopian; in the sense that our task is possibly more distant and certainly more difficult. We are more revolutionary in the sense that a revolution means a reversal: a reversal of direction, even if it were accompanied with a restraint upon pace. The world we want is much more different from the existing world than the existing world is different from the world of Socialism. Indeed, as has been already noted, there is not much difference between the present world and Socialism; except that we have left out the less important and more ornamental notions of Socialism, such additional fancies as justice, citizenship, the abolition of hunger, and so on. We have already accepted anything that anybody of intelligence ever disliked in Socialism. We have everything that critics used to complain of in the desolate utility and unity of Looking Backward. In so far as the world of Wells or Webb was criticized as a centralized, impersonal, and monotonous civilization, that is an exact description of existing civilization. Nothing has been left out but some idle fancies about feeding the poor or giving rights to the populace. In every other way the unification and regimentation is already complete. Utopia has done its worst. Capitalism has done all that Socialism threatened to do. The clerk has exactly the sort of passive functions and permissive pleasures that he would have in the most monstrous model village. I do not sneer at him; he has many intelligent tastes and domestic virtues in spite of the civilization he enjoys. They are exactly the tastes and virtues he could have as a tenant and servant of the State. But from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep again, his life is run in grooves made for him by other people, and often other people he will never even know. He lives in a house that he does not own, that he did not make, that he does not want. He moves everywhere in ruts; he always goes up to his work on rails. He has forgotten what his fathers, the hunters and the pilgrims and the wandering minstrels, meant by finding their way to a place. He thinks in terms of wages; that is, he has forgotten the real meaning of wealth. His highest ambition is concerned with getting this or that subordinate post in a business that is already a bureaucracy. There is a certain amount of competition for that post inside that business; but so there would be inside any bureaucracy. This is a point that the apologists of monopoly often miss. They sometimes plead that even in such a system there may still be a competition among servants; presumably a competition in servility. But so there might be after Nationalization, when they were all Government servants. The whole objection to State Socialism vanishes, if that is an answer to the objection. If every shop were as thoroughly nationalized as a police station, it would not prevent the pleasing virtues of jealousy, intrigue, and selfish ambition from blooming and blossoming among them, as they sometimes do even among policemen.
Anyhow, that world exists; and to challenge that world may be called Utopian; to change that world may be called insanely Utopian. In that sense the name may be applied to me and those who agree with me, and we shall not quarrel with it. But in another sense the name is highly misleading and particularly inappropriate. The word “Utopia” implies not only difficulty of attainment but also other qualities attached to it in such examples as the Utopia of Mr. Wells. And it is essential to explain at once why they do not attach to our Utopia — if it is a Utopia.
There is such a thing as what we should call ideal Distributism; though we should not, in this vale of tears, expect Distributism to be ideal. In the same sense there certainly is such a thing as ideal Communism. But there is no such thing as ideal Capitalism; and there is no such thing as a Capitalist ideal. As we have already noticed (though it has not been noticed often enough), whenever the capitalist does become an idealist, and specially when he does become a sentimentalist, he always talks like a Socialist. He always talks about “social service” and our common interests in the whole community. From this it follows that in so far as such a man is likely to have such a thing as a Utopia, it will be more or less in the style of a Socialist Utopia. The successful financier can put up with an imperfect world, whether or no he has the Christian humility to recognize himself as one of its imperfections. But if he is called upon to conceive a perfect world, it will be something in the way of the pattern state of the Fabians or the I.L.P. He will look for something systematized, something simplified, something all on the same plan. And he will not get it; at least he will not get it from me. It is exactly from that simplification and sameness that I pray to be saved, and should be proud if I could save anybody. It is exactly from that order and unity that I call on the name of Liberty to deliver us.
